A new order from the Trump administration “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” aims to make school harder for LGBTQ+ and other minority students by removing pillars of support. The Executive Order threatens teachers who support LGBTQ+ equality and are safe adults for young people; and censors discussions about racial inequality, privilege, and identity. The South has long been a testing-ground for conservative policies like this one. Many of the goals and strategies of this Executive Order have already been implemented as state laws in various parts of the South. This has long been a conservative strategy: Roll out discriminatory laws in deeply conservative states, see how they fare against court challenges and public opinion, and then make the needed revisions to roll them out nationally. We’ve seen this strategy used effectively to roll back abortion rights, voting rights, and the civil rights of immigrants, as well as to implement transgender sports bans and bans on gender-affirming care.
This conservative strategy means that Southern organizers have also had the opportunity to develop and test resistance and non-compliance strategies. The Supportive Schools team at the Campaign for Southern Equality has compiled a number of tactics and actions that we’ve seen from students, educators, and parents across the South, and we share them with you now so you can prepare for what’s coming.
An important flag about these resistance strategies: Not all of them may be the right fit for every situation or for every person at every time. When deciding actions to take, please consider the potential consequences that you or your colleagues may face, and know that there is never pressure for you and you alone to tackle the injustice of these laws. But if you’re looking for some inspiration, here are some ideas.
General Principles
Build alliances.
Political attacks on LGBTQ+ students, staff and content in schools are only one part of a larger attack on public schools, which has not let up since Brown v. Board of Education ended racial segregation in schools. Conservative tactics include drowning public schools in regulations, requirements, and red tape, while using voucher programs to shift public school funding to private and religious schools. Effective organizing by LGBTQ+ people and groups is most effective when it’s undertaken in partnership with other civil rights organizations. School-focused, multi-issue membership organizations like Red, Wine and Blue and Public School Strong have been particularly successful.
Engage in collective action.
When people organize and take action together, it is both safer and more effective. Rather than speaking up on your own, find like minded folks in your community to join you. Connecting with your local chapter of Public School Strong, PFLAG, GSA Network, or GLSEN could be a great place to start finding those folks.
Don’t over comply or obey in advance.
Most parents, teachers, and students prefer to avoid conflict, follow the rules, and not get into trouble. That’s what the Trump Administration is counting on. When a teacher removes all the books with transgender characters from their shelves, in order to protect themselves from possible conflicts, they are “voluntarily” censoring books far beyond what the law can require. As Timothy Snyder notes in On Tyranny, “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.” If we believe in freedom and equality, our kids and our country need us to stand up and speak out.
Know your history.
You can find ideas and inspiration in the civil disobedience, protest art, and activist strategies of earlier civil rights movements and from the history of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. There’s a reason they want to ban those books! We highly recommend checking out Invisible Histories, an organization that locates, collects, researches, and creates community-based, educational programming around LGBTQ+ history in the Deep South, for some inspiration and education.
Keep your eyes on the prize.
US society is in a time of transition: leaving behind a conception of gender as fixed and binary and a belief in male superiority, and moving towards understanding gender as expansive and fluid, and a belief in gender equality. Women’s suffrage was part of this struggle; so is the gay rights movement. Today the front lines of the struggle are the civil rights of transgender and non-binary people. There will inevitably be bigotry, hate speech, and violence; there will be discriminatory laws and policies and executive orders passed against us. It’s easier to take these losses when we remember the strength of the backlash is the measure of our success: the social transformation to gender liberation is already well underway.
Strategies and Tactics
Any member of the school community can get involved in resisting unjust laws and school policies. In general, we’ve seen three types of resistance:
- Non-compliance: School staff and faculty who simply refuse to obey discriminatory policies and laws.
- Hostile compliance: Obeying the specific letter of the law while defying or undermining its intent.
- Creating alternatives: When one way is blocked, find another way.
Get involved in your school community.
The most important thing any person can do is show up. Attend school board meetings and use the public comment period to speak out. Volunteer in your child’s classroom and read diverse books. Join the Media and Technology Advisory Committee, which reviews challenged books and makes decisions about book bans. Join the PTO or PTA as an outspoken advocate for the civil rights of all students. Help organize sports clubs or teams that don’t discriminate against trans athletes. Donate banned books to the school library.
Refuse to comply with discriminatory laws and policies.
This is, overwhelmingly, the most common response from school staff and faculty who are required to do things like outing trans students without their permission, deliberately misgendering students, or policing the use of restrooms. Sometimes, this is quiet non-compliance, but at other times, faculty have invoked Title IX non-discrimination requirements, or their professional codes of ethics, to openly insist that the administration cannot force them to take actions that harm students.
Use school assignments to get around anti-LGBTQ+ censorship.
Students in Florida were the first to figure out that Don’t Say LGBTQ+ laws are binding on school staff and faculty, but students still retain their freedom of speech. They started using school assignments to research and share content that their teachers could not, and their actions rapidly spread to other states. If a book is banned, then that’s a great choice for a book report. If your history teacher can’t talk about an LGBTQ+ historical figure or event, then that’s a powerful topic for your history project. “Intersex and Non-binary: Understanding Human Gender Diversity” makes a science fair project that will get lots of attention. “Censorship and the First Amendment” is a great topic for a social studies or civics class.
Look for the loopholes in anti-LGBTQ+ school policies.
The curriculum bans in most Don’t Say LGBTQ+ laws restrict teachers from providing “instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation”– but there’s an exemption for responding to students’ questions. As long as the discussions are student-initiated, the teacher is legally protected. This has resulted in many classroom conversations about gender and sexual identity that are broader and deeper than they would have been without the Don’t Say LGBTQ+ laws.
Create opportunities for LGBTQ+ student peer support.
A GSA (Genders and Sexualities Alliance) is an extracurricular club that offers peer support, education, and advocacy opportunities to LGBTQ+ students and allies. The legal right to have a GSA is well established; if your school bans them, or treats them differently than other clubs, we encourage you to contact the ACLU. We’ve seen conservative administrators suppress GSA’s by requiring that the faculty advisors of every club submit a list of members, knowing this is a major deterrent for students who are not safely able to be out to their families. Faculty advisors have responded by listing only those members who are safe in being out; they aren’t required to report every student who ‘just drops by.’ Students have also organized clubs around a hobby or shared interest, and then used that group to do the activities of a GSA. In other districts, students and adults have just moved the GSA off campus, meeting at a local library or coffee shop. If you are interested in starting a GSA at your school, GSA Network is a national organization that can help you get started and provide a network of support.
Find alternatives to school sports teams that discriminate against transgender student athletes.
In 2020, Idaho became the first state to ban transgender athletes from participating in interscholastic sports, and since then, sports bans have spread across the nation. Many trans athletes have simply quit playing sports, but many people are resisting these harmful policies. Sometimes cisgender athletes and coaches have quit, refusing to be part of a discriminatory team. As an alternative, students, faculty and volunteers have organized gender-inclusive sports clubs and leagues, both inside and outside the school, where all students are welcome to play. Some sports, like ultimate frisbee and dodgeball, are designed to be open to people of all genders. An athletic system structured around binary gender is ultimately not a good fit for a gender diverse society; many athletes and coaches are starting to take these sports bans as an opportunity to build a new, more inclusive, world of sports.
Resist anti-LGBTQ+ policies through creative expression.
No society in the history of the world has ever been fully able to control the creative expression of its young people, but that hasn’t stopped schools from adding a ban on pride rainbows to their dress code. So students get creative. Does the dress code cover buttons, stickers, and patches? Are they policing socks and underwear and nail polish? What if your whole ensemble is a rainbow? What if you and five friends wear solid colors and walk in a line? A lot of Bible verse t-shirts have rainbows as decoration, are those restricted too? How about a Beyoncé, Taylor Swift or vintage Pink Floyd t-shirt? And if they’re suppressing all the rainbows, there are lots of other pride flags to choose from…
Some schools are also prohibiting teachers from displaying pride flags or ‘Safe Space’ stickers, so teachers have to find creative ways to let their students know they are LGBTQ-affirming: pictures of LGBTQ+ authors or historical figures, motivational posters with a rainbow in the background, an illustration of Newton’s prism experiment, even the arrangement of markers or colored pencils.
In Ban This Book by Alan Gratz, a fourth grader creates a secret library of banned books in an unused locker. Not surprisingly, many elementary and middle school students have followed that inspiration. They aren’t even breaking the rules, because book bans are imposed on the school; students are free to share their own books with each other.
Encourage LGBTQ+ student artists.
LGBTQ+ youth have long been among our society’s most creative and prolific artists: drawing, painting, sculpture, collage, dancing, theater, video, photography, poetry, fiction, graphic novels, and every other form of creative expression. Adults should support and encourage their creativity, and help provide opportunities to put their art on display. Young artists should know that what you have to say is worth sharing, particularly in authoritarian times.
Use the curriculum review processes put into place by conservative groups to request more LGBTQ+ representation in the curriculum.
All public schools allow parents to review the school curriculum and file complaints and concerns. In states with “Don’t Say LGBTQ+” laws, we see the same policies on steroids, put into place so that Moms for Liberty and other conservative groups can block content related to racial justice and LGBTQ+ identities. Well, we can use those strategies too. Organize a group of parents to review the curriculum of a classroom, grade or school. Do you see over-representation of cisgender and heterosexual characters? Under-representation of queer and trans people, families, and historical figures? How about racial representation, people with disabilities, immigrant and international characters, and people from non-Christian faith traditions? If you like what you find, commend the teacher and the school. If you don’t, file a complaint of educational bias. It will take some work, but we can use the conservatives’ rules to advocate for the diverse and inclusive materials that our kids deserve.
If you are disciplined for standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, get it in writing.
For both students and school staff, if you are disciplined in any way for standing up for your rights, insist that the administration put it in writing. Their letter should include the policy that was violated, a specific explanation of how your actions violated that policy, and any consequences or punishment that are imposed. You have the right to write a rebuttal and have it added to your personnel folder or student records. You can also ask the administration to ‘put it in writing’ if you feel they are asking you to do something unethical or illegal. If they aren’t willing to document it, you aren’t required to comply. This strategy helps guard against administrative abuses of power.
Make space for pride, joy, laughter, and celebration.
When it comes down to the Politicians vs. the Pride Festival, I think the folks on our side are a lot more fun. When we live as ourselves, when we take joy in who we are, when we accept and celebrate each other, we offer a stark contrast to those who are focused on punishment, censorship, and control. Our humor and our creativity are medicine for an increasingly repressive society.
We’ve shared a few ideas here, but we know there are many more. Ask around your schools and your town, to learn what’s going on – and if you don’t hear about anything, get something started, choosing the right level of risk for yourself and your community. We hope you’ll let us know how it goes!
Disclaimer: The Campaign for Southern Equality provides these examples for informational purposes only. This information does not constitute legal advice.
